REGENT GLACIAL WORK IN EUROPE. 103 



RECENT GLACIAL WORK IN EUROPE. 



Bt Mrs. K. B. CLAYPOLE. 



AT the recent meeting of the British Association at Newcastle, 

 Prof. James Geikie opened the Section of Geology with a 

 summary of the results obtained during the last few years by 

 continental glacialists. Sketching the steps by which the iceberg 

 theory has been abandoned by German and Swiss geologists, he 

 dwelt on certain features of the drifts of the peripheral areas, 

 which for some time were hard to account for by land-ice. Of 

 these, the bedded deposits occurring so frequently in the bowlder- 

 clays of the peripheral regions, and the occasional silty and un- 

 compressed character of the clays themselves, remained unex- 

 plained until a clew was found to their origin in the geographical 

 distribution of the clays in which they occur. ' These stony clays, 

 of inconsiderable thickness in Norway, the higher parts of Sweden, 

 and in Finland, reach a thickness of about forty-three metres 

 in southern Sweden, and eighty metres in the northern parts 

 of Prussia ; and in Holstein attain a depth of one hundred and 

 twenty to one hundred and forty metres, and still greater depths 

 in Hanover, Mark Brandenburg, and Saxony. The aqueous de- 

 posits associated with the stony clays also gradually acquire more 

 importance as they are followed from the mountainous and high- 

 lying tracts to the low ground, until, along the southern margin 

 of the drift area, the " diluvium " appears to consist of aqueous 

 accumulations alone. The explanations of these facts by German 

 geologists have been summed up recently (1884) by Dr. Jentzsch, 

 from whom Prof. Geikie quoted enough to show that they are 

 quite in accordance with the views long held by glacialists else- 

 where. 



The general conclusions reached by continental glacialists, and 

 summarized by Prof. Geikie, are : 



1. Before the invasion of northern Germany by the inland 

 ice, the low grounds bordering on the Baltic were overflowed by 

 a sea which contained a boreal and arctic fauna. 



2. The next geological horizon in ascending order is that which 

 is marked by the glacial and fluvio-glacial detritus of the great 

 ice-sheet which flowed to the foot of the Harz Mountains, and has 

 been traced by the occasional presence of rock-strise and roches- 

 moutonnees, of bowlder-clay and northern erratics, rather than 

 by recognizable terminal moraines. 



3. A well-marked temperate fauna and flora marks the inter- 

 glacial beds which follow, and which, in their geographical dis- 

 tribution and the presence in them of such forms as Elephas 

 antiquus, Cervus elephas, and C. megaceros, and a flora compar- 



